Our First Love

by Anthony Lamarr

  I started walking by “the Set” on my way to and from lunch twice a week. I could take another less traveled route, but I didn’t. The set was the main hangout spot on the Hill. Students congregated outside on the plaza between classes, and it’s often the stage for fraternity and sorority step shows, as well as social and political rallies. Dr. Hubert Alexander, who heads the journalism department, talked me into walking over to the Set during lunch to watch the homecoming week step show featuring the Kappa, Sigma, Omega, and Chi Alpha fraternities. While waiting for the show to get started, Dr. Alexander told me he pledged Kappa at FAMU twenty-seven years ago and the thing he missed most about his college days was stepping with his brothers. I saw the longing in his eyes when the Kappas kicked things off with a sharp chanting step with their red and white walking canes. Changing the pace, they wooed the crowd with a slightly erotic, yet chivalric, routine to “Gigolos Get Lonely Too” by the popular ’80s band, Morris Day and The Time. The Sigmas followed with an explosive display of hip-hop choreography and precision timing. Then the Chi Alphas took to the stage and artfully recreated the frat’s signature step and chant. I knew their routine step for step, word for word, as the memories of the exact routine with my brothers at Howard rushed to the forefront. I tried my best to ignore the chanting in my head, but the words and the rhythm kept flowing. My feet wanted to move, to step and tap, to stomp, but I would not give them permission. Evidently, they didn’t need it because they stomped anyway. Normally, I don’t let myself miss or even think about my foregone existence, but since I had no other choice, I gave in. Unguarded. And guiltless. Ravenously, I reminisced.

  * * *

  The girl whose name I never knew showed up again. That’s why I didn’t look back. I was musing about my days at Howard. My first two years living in the dorm. Pledging Chi Alpha. Stepping with my brothers. Dad helping me move into the fraternity house he helped construct when he was a student at Howard. I wasn’t thinking about her or that drunken night at the frat house, so her showing up was unexpected.

  * * *

  I started to hate her for showing up like this. Damn started to. I hated her.

  * * *

  The first time a guy had sex was a pivotal moment in his life. It’s a tale he would tell and retell until he’s reborn into eternity. She was my first and she left too many holes in my story. If I wanted to tell someone and tell it like I remembered it, the discontinuity would make the plot impossible to follow, so I never told anyone about my first time. It wasn’t entirely her fault, but I needed to blame somebody. Why not blame her? I wanted my first time to be with a woman I cared about or at least a woman whose name I knew.

  * * *

  If I told myself the truth, I could’ve gotten over not knowing her name by caulking the holes in my story. But I couldn’t forgive her for looking me in the eyes three times after that night and walking away without saying a word. The last time I saw her, she looked through me like I wasn’t even there. That was the real reason I hated her.

  * * *

  I wondered if my fascination with the woman I met at Barney’s funeral had something to do with me and the girl from Howard. She was the first woman I made love to and I never knew her name. Now, I was falling helplessly in love with another woman whose name I didn’t know. I didn’t know if she even lived in Tallahassee, but whenever I left the house, I find myself combing the city hoping to see her. My hypothesis was, since she was at Barney’s funeral, she’s involved in government. I changed my route to work. Now, I took the parkway to Monroe Street, which passed directly through the government district. I could hardly keep my eyes on the road driving to and from campus. At the supermarket, I wandered down more aisles looking for her than I did for the items on Caleb’s grocery list. And as much as I hated malls, I’d spent a few Saturday afternoons roaming around the Governor’s Square Mall, the Tallahassee Mall, and nearly every shopping center in town hoping to see her. I couldn’t stop hoping, and I didn’t think I wanted to.

  * * *

  I was a virgin until I was twenty-one. I was saving myself for the woman I would marry one day…whoever she turned out to be. On my fifteenth birthday, during his birds and bees lecture, Dad told me that Mom was the first woman he had sex with and it was on their wedding night. He also said, and proud of the fact, that Mom was the only woman he had ever been intimate with. From that moment on, I wanted the kind of love and marriage my parents had. I wanted my future wife to be my first and my last lover. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it happened. My first time was with a girl whose name I didn’t know. I had sex a few more times with two other women, both casual acquaintances at Howard, but those escapades were sex, nothing more. That was a long, long time ago.

  Caleb was still a virgin, as far as I was aware. Unless he got it on with one of the neighborhood girls before that December night thirteen years ago, he’s a virgin. Sometimes, I wonder if he even thought about women and sex. He never talked about it, but then there are a lot of things we didn’t talk about.

  * * *

  Barney Aman was someone we didn’t talk about anymore. I caught myself thinking about Barney quite often, but I never talked about him with Caleb. I’ve even driven twelve miles across town more than once or twice to ride by Barney’s unoccupied house, which Richard Aman refused to sell, rent, or set foot in after his son’s death. Barney’s ordeal changed me, and I was not sure whether it’s for the better or worse. My current job was the most obvious change, but I’d changed in ways no one could see. Now, my heart beat with unbridled rhapsody after finding a reason to live at a cemetery. When I saw Frances at Barney’s burial, I remembered why Barney said he stayed in the relationship with a married woman and a dangerous secret for so long.

  “I loved her,” Barney admitted to me the evening I stopped by his house with the manila envelope. “Frances and I had been seeing each other for years before her husband found out.”

  “Why is Frances suggesting you had something to do with his death?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t remember much about that night because I’d been drinking. But, Frances and I were at a motel when he burst in. They argued but ended up leaving together. I guess I passed out afterwards. But, I woke up the next morning in another motel room fifty miles away with blood stains on my clothes. And I don’t remember how I got there. So, I don’t know what part I played in Terry’s death.”

  “Did you and Frances ever talk about it?”

  “No. We never spoke a word about that night.”

  Then he told me, “She thought we would be able to come out publicly with our relationship, but after that night, I began to withdraw from her.”

  I assured Barney his secret was safe with me. Still, it was obvious the exposure made him uneasy, including my part in covering it up. In hindsight, it was at that moment when Barney began searching for a way out.

  As I opened the front door to leave, Barney asked in a forlorn tone, “Nigel, have you ever really loved someone?”

  My illusory smile answered for me.

  Despite its tragic ending, Barney’s ordeal affected me more than I realized. I was content with the emptiness of my life until the day that manila envelope landed on my desk. After Barney’s death, I began to consider the possibility of having more in my life; of simply having a life. I wanted to live; to love and be loved. Then I saw her at the cemetery. I may never see her again, but it felt good to know that my heart, though freezer burnt, was still capable of feeling love and desire.

  * * *

  It was the Wednesday before our two-day Thanksgiving break. I was at a university-sponsored faculty luncheon when she walked in the Grand Ballroom and sat at a table near the door. Until that moment, it never occurred to me to associate the orange and green Rattler umbrella she carried at the cemetery with FAMU’s school colors and mascot. I thought I was dreaming, so I felt for the tape on my eyes. I was awake which meant she was real. After five months, I couldn’t believe I was actually looking at her.


  I was sitting at a table across the ballroom from where she was seated. Dr. Alexander and Dr. Phyllis Sneeds, a journalism ethics professor, were sitting at the table with me. They talked constantly as we dined on a catered lunch of steaks, baked potato, greens salad, and chocolate cake. Their back-and-forth banner during the president’s address didn’t bother me, because I couldn’t hear them or the speech. I was too busy taking her in. I knew I wasn’t going to mention her when I gave Caleb the details of our day, but I still asked myself all the questions he would ask if I did include her.

  How does she look?

  She’s a Halle.

  Monster’s Ball Halle or Jinx Halle?

  Jinx.

  Her eyes?

  Alluring. Soft brown.

  Hair?

  Mid-length. Silky straight. Dark with subtle highlights.

  What was she wearing?

  A beige, fitted turtleneck sweater and a brown skirt that hung halfway over her knee-high tan boots.

  Who was she sitting with?

  Two nice-looking, middle-age women. I assumed they’re professors since it was a faculty luncheon.

  What does she teach?

  I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I would probably say she teaches something in political science or business.

  Then, for some unknown reason, I would blurt out, Caleb, man you should see her smile!

  He’d clear his throat, take his time sitting up in Dad’s recliner, and ask nonchalantly, Her smile?

  Yeah, her smile. It’s really something to behold.

  Finally, he would ask the question that plagued me the entire luncheon.

  What’s her name?

  Her name?

  Yeah. Her name.

  Damn. That’s strange. I’m coming up blank. What is her name?

  You’re so full of shit. You didn’t ask her.

  I was going to, but after the luncheon, she was busy mingling with some of the other professors. I guessed she already knew them. When they were done talking, she walked across campus to the School of Business faculty parking lot and got in her silver Pathfinder and drove off before I could ask her.

  And then…?

  Then I walked back across campus to where I was parked, got in my car, and drove home.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was a Monday morning three years ago.

  Life went on as usual outside.

  There was no mail so Vernon, the mailman, looked toward the front window and waved as he drove by.

  Across the street, joggers and most of the hikers zipped by Mr. and Mrs. Retired Walker, who held hands as they took their daily stroll on the meandering trails at Myers Park. Caleb and Nigel moved into the red brick house on Circle Drive six years ago, and since then, Caleb has watched the couple grow older and walk closer to each other. He didn’t know their names, but after several weeks of seeing them almost daily, Caleb christened the couple Mr. and Mrs. Retired Walker.

  A much younger couple, both doctoral students at Florida State University and new residents of the Myers Park neighborhood, played a frisky game of twenty-one on the basketball court. On the tennis courts, two bureaucratic housewives played their weekly game of tennis while their nannies tended to the toddlers on the playground. And a park worker sang to himself as he circled the baseball field aboard one of the maintenance department’s new riding mowers.

  Several blocks from Myers Park, the trading floors opened in downtown Tallahassee as lobbyists and lawmakers began doing business over brunch and Cuban cigars during their mid-morning session break.

  A few blocks farther north, in the Sentinel’s newsroom, Nigel conducted a phone interview with the Springtime Tallahassee Parade coordinator.

  Life went on as usual outside 207 Circle Drive. But inside—behind its suppressive doors, windows, and walls—Caleb was realizing a frightening truth: Death was the absence of a life and not the end of all life.

  Two seconds earlier, Caleb stepped off the armrest of his dad’s black recliner. A minute before that, he took his shoes off, stood on the recliner, and tied the loose end of a twisted bed sheet around his neck. Thirty seconds before that he dragged the recliner from its post by the window to the middle of the floor. It took twenty-two minutes to disconnect the ceiling fan from the beam, then attach the sheet to the beam. About a minute and a half to compose a note to Nigel stating, I love you Nigel. Live. And six minutes to build up the courage to go through with the decision he’d contemplated for nearly two months. So it had been nearly a half hour since Caleb decided he could no longer live inside a coffin.

  It was two hours before noon.

  Caleb did not die a physical death that morning, but he finally lay to rest the hope that he would one day disremember the malignant taste of fear. Ironically, it was his fear that saved him that morning. Two seconds after stepping off the armrest, when he saw his life flash before him, a grotesquely rendered picture emerged of an eternity spent outside these walls. Of never-ending freezing and breathing water. Of an end to his story. Of the look on Nigel’s face when he opened the front door. Of Nigel alone. Until that moment, Caleb saw death as his way out—his ticket to a life without fear. But trying to die showed him that death was merely a conclusion and the only thing afterward was a future without him…at least in this world. He would cease to exist, but life and time would not. So he decided to keep living. He grabbed the noose and fought desperately to get his legs around the backrest of the recliner. The noose, anticipating his change of mind, tightened around his neck. His lungs were about to implode. He used his legs to pull himself on top of the backrest and loosen the tension on the bedspread. He fell off the recliner during his rush to untie the noose. Then he struggled to fill his deprived lungs. He clung to the floor for nearly a minute, trying to erase the picture inside his head. It took fifteen seconds to push the recliner back over by the window. Forty minutes to untie the sheet and reattach the ceiling fan to the beam. Thirty-two seconds to burn his note to Nigel in the kitchen sink. Less than a second to resolve that Nigel never needed to know about the hanging man. Another five minutes to put the navy blue and white sheet back on his bed, then make the bed. And the rest of his life to live with the morning, he tried to exorcise his fear.

  It was still an hour before noon.

  * * *

  Caleb spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in his dad’s black recliner staring out the window. He wasn’t sure whether he or the world outside had changed but something was different. Everything looked the same. People frolicked about at the park. Cars barely missed each other as they jostled on Circle Drive. Professor Childers, wearing a gray tweed jacket and matching cap, waved at passing motorists as he strolled to his mailbox. The world out there was still the same. Caleb held his hand in front of his face. The burrowed lifelines in his palms were still shaped like a W. Both hands still had the small nubs of sixth fingers that were cut off at birth. He pressed his hands against the window and realized how fear can exaggerate—turn inches into miles. The distance between his hands and the other side of the window had become immeasurable.

  Caleb decided right then to forget everything that transpired that morning. He felt he was entitled to purposefully erase this attempt at dying since God fixed it so he didn’t have to remember his first death. He began to tell himself all the things he would no longer remember. As he selectively uttered the words aloud, one behind the other, the words disseminated into syllables, letters, sounds, thoughts, then into nothingness.

  “…was tired.”

  “The ceiling…”

  “…tied…”

  “B-r-e-a-t-h-i-n-g…”

  “…D-e…”

  “.”

  He forgot the ineffable agony of a constricting noose around the neck of a hanging man. Then he released the anger that he deemed tangible, flowing as fluidly as blood. Caleb made the choice to be happy living in his world with its sequestered walls and telescopic windows; its flinty hardwood floors and crumbling sky; and the canned meadows and
mountains and oceans that colored its vapid air. He didn’t fool himself into believing everything he hated about his world had suddenly become appealing. Instead, he gratefully accepted his friable life for what it was, because now he knew that ending the story was way harder than living it.

  CHAPTER 10 CALEB

  My world was unchanging. I could paint these walls every color in the heavens, but I would still be living within a dungeon of reachable moons and planets and stars inside galaxies that go on and on forever.

  Our life was turning Nigel into an old man way before his time. And as much as I hated to take the blame for it, my condition had a lot to do with his premature aging. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t look bad for his age. What’s breaking down was Nigel’s spirit. He had the spirit of a man who knew he’d lived too long and the only thing he had to look forward to was the rare night his dreams transported him back to one of the few happy moments of his prior life. Something akin to catching a Hail Mary pass and scoring a touchdown during the last seconds of the game to win the district championship for his high school football team, or seeing the smile on our mother’s face at the surprise party we gave her on her forty-third birthday, or fishing in Flatley Creek with Dad and me. Nigel had a long life ahead of him, but he acted like all his happy moments have already been lived and captured in the framed portraits lining our hallway and living room walls.

  I hoped this new job as an assistant professor of journalism at FAMU would lift his spirits. I sent out seven resumes and, within a week, Nigel received five calls for interviews. The call I was hoping for came first. Nigel was sitting by the phone when Dr. Hubert Alexander, FAMU’s journalism department chairperson, called but he didn’t budge. I answered the phone and pretended I was Nigel. Dr. Alexander said he admired our work for the Capitol Sentinel and he was extremely interested in meeting with us to discuss the assistant professor position. I, well me as Nigel, told Dr. Alexander I could meet with him the next day. He asked if ten-thirty would be a good time, and I told him ten-thirty was fine. When I hung up the phone, Nigel, who was playing tic-tac-toe with the TV remote, asked who I was talking to. I answered him with a question, “What did you say, Professor Greene?”